Interview: Ray Suhy

Jazz guitar, metal guitar, and the spaces in between...

Have you heard the latest Six Feet Under album, Killing For Revenge? I bet you haven’t, and it’s your loss. This album rips.

I have to admit being surprised myself. I have not been a fan of Six Feet Under in the past. I thought they were little more than former Cannibal Corpse vocalist Chris Barnes’ vain attempt to stay relevant by playing to the knuckle-walking chuds who make up a depressingly large portion of the death metal scene. But this album really spun my head around and got it banging. And when I read the credits, I was stunned, because Six Feet Under’s lead guitarist, Ray Suhy, had impressed the hell out of me in an entirely different context — as co-leader of the Ray Suhy/Lewis Porter Quartet, whose 2020 album Transcendent very much lived up to its name.

So when I found out that the quartet had a new album coming (it’s called What Happens Next, and it’s out on Friday), I decided it would be great to talk to Ray Suhy about the two sides of his musical personality and how they mesh. In the process, I came away with more respect for Six Feet Under than I’d previously had (their 2020 album Nightmares of the Decomposed is, I would argue, a seriously unappreciated experimental work within a conservative genre).

So a few days after Six Feet Under finished touring in support of Killing For Revenge, I called Suhy at home in New Jersey and we spoke for a while about jazz, metal, and music in general. I hope you enjoy this conversation; I know I did. (Funny side note: the software I use for transcription apparently thought two guys from Jersey talking were one guy from Jersey talking, because it rendered the transcript as basically a single solid block of text, with no differentiation between speakers.)

So Ray, the reason I want to talk to you is because you’re kind of in a weird way sort of the ideal Burning Ambulance artist, because we cover jazz and metal about 50-50.

Oh, nice.

And so a guy with your background is exactly who I want to be spotlighting.

Thank you. I appreciate it.

So I guess let’s start there — like, you joined Six Feet Under in 2016, but I guess the Torment album had already been recorded. So tell me the story, right?

Yeah, so that album was already written and recorded by the bassist Jeff Hughell, and I was gonna do a couple leads on it but it just didn’t work out. So the first record I’m on — well, actually, I mean, I’m on Graveyard Classics IV; I was on that before I was in the band, because I played in the band Cannabis Corpse before that and the bassist Phil [Hall] produced a couple Six Feet Under records. So I’m actually on Crypt of the Devil, a couple solos, and then all the guitars and bass on Graveyard Classics IV is me.

Okay and that was taking Judas Priest and Iron Maiden songs and kind of death metal-izing them, basically.

Yeah, you know, we play them pretty faithfully. I mean, if it was my — if I had pure creative control over that I probably would have metallized them more, but basically, all we did was just play the same riffs, the Judas Priest and Iron Maiden riffs like in B standard tuning rather than E, you know. Yeah, it’s just like a little lower tuning.

So the first Six Feet Under album that you’re really featured on then was Nightmares of the Decomposed, which was also the album on which [former Cannibal Corpse guitarist] Jack Owen joined the band. So what’s the breakdown of creative responsibilities, because from what I read, people seem to think he’s the primary songwriter now. Is that the case?

Yeah, it’s the case now. Yeah, so he’s written the last two records. So when he and Chris reunited after all that time, you know, the label and the both of them like wanted to make a record together that was the two of them, you know, the first thing they’ve done together since Cannibal Corpse’s The Bleeding. So Jack’s been handling all the riffs and I do the majority of the solos…probably 99% of them.

Okay, because there’s some really, really nice playing on those songs, like I really like the solo on “Amputator.” I really like the solo on “Dead Girls Don’t Scream,” so talk to me about what you think about and what you bring to that material.

You know, playing in the death metal genre, I mean obviously you’re gonna kind of play the metal-y solos and stuff, but I try to sneak in some, whenever I can, some arpeggios and then some different patterns that I may use when I improvise in jazz. But “Amputator,” I remember he wanted, like, a wild Kerry King kind of Kirk Hammett sort of thing on that, so I just kind of channeled that stuff through my own playing, you know, kicked on the wah and just kind of went for it with not too much regard for the tonality of the solo sections. It was pretty wild. “Dead Girls Don’t Scream,” I remember I wanted to start the solo with like a sweep tap kind of lick, you know, so I did, but it also has a cliché on the top that I that I got from gypsy jazz — like, the root note, the tap moves down a half step at a time and that’s very similar to a gypsy jazz lick. So yeah, I always try to kind of borrow things from all the different genres. I’ll get really bluesy, because I love blues as well, so, you know, I try to mix, like, the shreddy things with blues and jazz weirdness when I can.

So tell me and sort of explain it to people who may not know this — how is a death metal song arranged? Does Jack come in and just kind of say, “Okay, fellas, I’ve written this song and it goes like this,” or are you all contributing ideas on some level?

Yeah, so in this band now, basically Jack just writes the songs, you know, and him and Chris will iron it out, as far as the arrangement and stuff like that goes for the vocals, and then the rest of us, we just contribute our own parts. So me and the solos and you know, the drummer [Marco Pitruzzella] has freedom to do what he wants and the bass player, too. So that’s how we work now, since we all live so far apart. We don’t actually get together and rehearse or play that much, you know. Actually, before this tour we did that was seven weeks, we didn’t rehearse once. And we hadn’t played together in five years. Chris lives in Seattle. The drummer lives in Seattle, too. Jeff, the bass player’s around Oakland, I’m in New Jersey, and Jack is in Illinois now, I think.

The music that you guys make is pretty knuckle-walking death metal, but you and the bassist and the drummer are amazing musicians. I used to listen to Brain Drill and I’ve heard some of the stuff that Jeff does on his solo stuff. You guys can play almost anything, so it’s sort of fascinating to me to hear you channel all of that into this kind of thing.

Yeah, that’s kind of the challenge, right? You want to kind of bring your own flavor to it, to this style of music which, you know, is not too technically demanding most of the time; roughly, tonality-wise it’s usually the same kind of key and scale, so it’s just like, as creative as you can get with that is kind of the challenge, and it’s fun.

Nightmares received a lot of negative reviews, I think mostly for external factors, and I’m not at all interested in litigating that, but I am curious what the feeling was within the band when it happened...

Yeah, so that that record came out during the pandemic, so this tour we just did was our first one in five years. So you know, the one thing I’ll say about that record is that Chris made a choice to scream a certain way, and the way he explained it to me is the record had this theme of a guy going crazy and losing his mind, so he wanted to sound deranged and gross, you know, and he didn’t let the producer do any effects or even a lot of EQ on it. You know, he just wanted to be really raw-sounding as a choice, so when that record came out, everyone was kind of talking shit about his vocals, but whenever we play live he sounds great. He sounds just like he did for years. So the choice he made on that record, I think people missed the point, and just thought he lost his voice.

Yeah, it’s funny because I was listening to the record last night and the song “Self-Imposed Death Sentence” was the one that really stuck out for me because, are you a Tom Waits guy at all?

Oh, big time.

Okay, you know the song “Hell Broke Luce” off of Real Gone? That’s what it reminded me of, what Barnes was doing — it reminded me of a Tom Waits kind of a performance, that real sort of unhinged in-character thing, and I feel like yeah, you’re right, people missed it.

Yeah, the metal world’s weird, you know, there’s a lot of ego, a lot of one-upmanship, and people love to talk shit. He made a creative choice and people just thought he couldn’t scream anymore.

So you said there was no rehearsal time before the most recent tour?

No, no, there was none. We all talked through some things like the endings and intros and segues, and then we just went for it.

Like I said, you guys are all amazing players. So you were able to lock in pretty much right away at the shows?

Yeah. Marco, you know, we didn't have Jeff Hughell on this tour. We had Jeff Golden and he did a great job, but Marco and I, you know, from playing together for years in Six Feet, we’re just really tight, like, we’re always kind of locked in. We also play in the band Waking The Cadaver together as well, which is kind of a slam kind of death metal band, so he and I are super tight. As soon as we hit the first song, we were locked in, which is cool.

Okay. Yeah, because that’s the thing in metal. There’s not a whole lot of room for improvisation, so it’s not like you have to learn each other’s languages like you would in a jazz group.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

But at the same time, do you feel like you guys tightened up over the course of the tour?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, after like five or six shows we were so much tighter than obviously the first show, and then at that point, after six shows in it was just like autopilot, you know? It was easy.

Yeah, the only metal band I think I’ve ever seen do anything that I would describe as jamming was Heaven And Hell, when Dio-era Sabbath reunited. They had a couple of songs where they would really stretch out and improvise, but that was the only time I’ve ever seen anybody do that.

Yeah, it would be nice if more bands did that, but you know, the genre, death metal in particular is just about pummeling, you know.

So, you played on Jeff Hughell’s album Orbital Existence in 2022. Tell me about that. What was that project like?

Yeah, Jeff is a very prolific writer, so he sent me a bunch of songs and he had me in mind for a specific track — I forget the song titles now, but I think that’s the record with Jørgen Munkeby on it from Shining. So he wanted to have me and him on the same song, which was awesome; I love that guy’s playing. So he sent me a rough of the track and I don’t know if the sax solo was on there yet, I actually don’t think it was — no, no, I’m wrong, it was on there because I remember I played off it a little bit. But yeah, he just gave me sections and let me do whatever I wanted, you know, which is great. I think it came out pretty cool.

So the other side of you is you’re a jazz guitarist. You have the quartet with Lewis Porter and Rudy Royston, and on the first record and the new one you had Joris Teepe on bass and then Brad Jones on the one in the middle. So kind of talk me through this group and how it came together.

Lewis and I met doing sessions with this guy Allen Lowe, an alto sax player. He plays tenor too, but... we met, sorry, let me back up a little bit. Allen and I met in Maine when I was working at a guitar store; he would come in and was playing guitar at the time, and we started talking about jazz and then he started hiring me for sessions and stuff and some gigs. And eventually we started going to New York and recording with musicians in New York, and Lewis was on one of the first sessions that I did with him, and Lewis and I had just a real simpatico right away, you know — there’s that shared love of Coltrane and Monk and others. We just locked right in and harmonically we were locked in right away and after a few of those sessions, we just started talking. I’m like, Hey, we should just make a record.

I hadn’t made my own jazz record, you know, I’d been on a couple of other people’s stuff, but that was a big step for me. We did that first record, Longing. I wrote a bunch of pieces for it and Lewis wrote a bunch of pieces, too and I was like, Hey, I want a drummer that can play kind of intensely and swing too that has the Elvin Jones kind of triplet thing that I love so much, and he recommended Rudy Royston. It was fantastic, and then he recommended Joris as well because he had a trio with them for quite a while, I think he made a record or two with them as the rhythm section. So yeah, yeah, so similar to the metal thing — no rehearsal, just rolled up with the tunes, you know, and we recorded them.

All the records I do with Lewis, they’re a little challenging for me because we do them live. I feel like jazz should be live, like, I’m not comfortable with overdubbing solos or anything. I know a lot of people do that and I wish I did it sometimes, things end up a little rougher than I would like. Every time we record a record I just want to quit, you know, I think I’m terrible but no, the beauty of this stuff is the interaction with people and playing off each other’s languages and styles, so we recorded that record in like six hours. All three records were done in about six, seven hours each.

So that’s how that came together with Lewis, and then we did Transcendent, the second record, with Brad Jones. I think we just wanted to try a different bass player to see how it was gonna affect the sound, and the scheduling didn’t work out with Joris, something weird happened there. Brad added a really nice melodic kind of interactive touch to that record. Listen to the way he plays behind the soloists. He’s just right in there all the time, you know. And then for this newest record we have coming out, March 14th is the digital release on Sunnyside. It’s called What Happens Next and we got Joris back in there, mostly because Joris has a fat sound. It’s a huge, huge sound, you know, and his feel was so good we kind of wanted to get back to that sound we had on the first record.

Do you play the same guitars with Six Feet Under that you do with Lewis? Because I feel like jazz needs more Flying Vs on stage at the Village Vanguard and places like that.

I did, so, um — the first two records I did use the same guitar I would use in Six Feet Under. Yeah, so I had a Vigier on the first record and then on the second record I played an Ibanez. I literally got off tour with Six Feet Under and then set the guitar up for standard tuning and made the jazz record with it, yeah. But this time, no. This time I used a Heritage Les Paul, which I don’t play in Six Feet Under. But yeah, jazz needs more Flying Vs for sure. That’d be so cool. Maybe I’ll roll up to Smalls with one next month.

Your playing is like — I have this joke that jazz guitarists play like they’re afraid someone might hear them, and you are not that guy. You’re not doing this sort of Jim Hall, Jakob Bro kind of thing...

No, and I love those guys.

Yeah, they absolutely have their place, but tell me about your actual approach and philosophy in terms of that.

My favorite musician of all time is John Coltrane, and he didn’t get up there and start whispering, you know? He’d just shout at you right away, even if he was playing real pretty, he’s loud, he’s right in your face. So when I solo, that’s kind of the mindset I take on that. I also really love free jazz and I spent a lot of time listening to Anthony Braxton and tons of people — the free Coltrane stuff, obviously, and Ornette Coleman and... I just love the unabashed energy and just, like, no fucks, just going up there and just ripping. So that’s really kind of, when I play jazz, that’s what I want to do most of the time. And it’s really more about an energy thing more than anything else; I just want to really bring the energy to the table, I don’t want to just sit in the background. I want to affect people the way my favorite players affected me. So that’s kind of my goal with that stuff.

When did you start listening to jazz and when did you start picking up on the idea of you know, quote-unquote jazz guitar? Whether it was, like, Grant Green or Sonny Sharrock, or whoever, who spoke to you as a young player?

It’s kind of odd for me because alright, so the full background, you know, obviously I grew up in the ’80s so classic rock, hair metal, thrash metal, those were my things, and then reading guitar magazines, everyone from you know, Alex Skolnick, of course and even Michael Wilton from Queensrÿche, they were talking about John Coltrane and Miles Davis and stuff in the in the guitar magazines. So I think maybe it was my freshman year in high school, our jazz band went down to Berklee to perform. I was playing in the jazz band and I wasn't even really listening to jazz, which is pretty funny. But a couple of the first records that I got were The Best of John Coltrane, which as soon as I put that on, I think “Equinox” was the first track, maybe; I can’t remember. But I just was transfixed, you know? So I got that record, I got Kind of Blue, and I got Cookbook, George Benson. No, not Cookbook — what was the name of it? It was his first record.

Okay, one of those early organ jazz records.

Yes. Okay, and when I put that on, I was like, what in the hell is this, you know? So between Coltrane and Benson, that was kind of where it really clicked in for me at first. And then later on, of course you get curious and you listen to everybody and you hear Jim Hall and the next guy that really floored me was Wes Montgomery, though, and I didn’t hear him until I went to Berklee, until I went to college. I was 18 and I got a tape of the Wes Montgomery trio, that organ trio record he has, and man, I put that on and I was frozen, you know, just transfixed completely and listened to that record about four times in a row. And then I need to mention Mike Stern as well. He was a good bridge for me as well between the rock and the jazz thing. When I was about 16 or so, someone played me — I was at a guitar camp actually and Jeff McErlain, who’s a really great guitar player, was teaching this improv class and he played something from We Want Miles, that live record, and same thing as when I heard Coltrane, same thing when I heard Wes, my jaw was just on the floor and I was just frozen, you know? I was so moved, and I was moved by the fact that he was combining the two things that I love so much, right? The rock stuff and then the bebop kind of phrasing.

I remember when I heard Miles the first time I was about 15, and I bought Kind of Blue because it was like five bucks on cassette, but then a couple of weeks later I bought You’re Under Arrest, because this was the mid-’80s, and so I heard those two records back to back and had to accept them both as facets of the same guy. And as a teenager, that’ll really spin your head around.

Totally. Yeah.

You’re like, Wait, how is this the same person, you know?

Yeah, I love it.

But yeah, that early ’80s band with Mike Stern and Marcus Miller, that was a heavy band, you know?

Incredible. Yeah, so good. I heard they’re trying to — I have some friends that know some of them and I heard they’re trying to do a show with Bill [Evans] and Marcus and [Al] Foster and Stern, you know, so hopefully that happens. That would be amazing.

So I have this idea that and I don’t know what you think about it, but I have this theory that ’70s fusion with a capital F stuff like Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return To Forever, that kind of thing is not really jazz, but I don’t mean that in a snobbish way; what I mean is that it strikes my ear as instrumental prog rock, and I’m wondering what you think about that.

Oh yeah, a hundred percent, right? So of course they have the improvisational elements, right? Which is the closest thing you could say that it has in common with jazz, but no, that’s — to me that’s compositional music, you know, of the prog rock variety for sure. I mean, it’s not far away from King Crimson really, some of that, a lot of it’s pretty interrelated. So yeah, I agree with that completely.

I was talking to Lenny White and he was talking about partying with the guys from Yes in the early ’70s, with Return To Forever.

That makes a lot of sense. I would say maybe Tony Williams Lifetime is closer to jazz, but, you know, still rock, still kind of proggy, right?

Yeah, and I mean if you look at the kit he was playing, he was not playing a little jazz kit, you know?

Yeah, yeah. So good.

So is there a fusion sort of element to your playing, do you think?

Yeah, for sure. Hundred percent, I mean, I listen to all those records a ton too. King Crimson is very big for me as well. We make these records, and I don’t aim for that kind of thing too much, you know? I’m still trying to keep it kind of more swing-based, I guess, but then when I kick on the distortion, you know, it’s gonna be fusion-sounding. That’s just kind of the nature of distorted guitar and the way that I play on it. I do want to make some fusion records, though, like with the capital F. Those are in the back of my mind and you know, I have this project Gematria which is a sort of a prog rock thing. It’s me and this drummer, a friend of mine, Steve Honoshowsky. He’s an excellent prog drummer, out of his mind, really — my favorite parts of our records are his drum parts, but it’s very King Crimson-inspired, you know, and I’ll throw in some kind of like oddly jazzy solos whenever I can, you know, so that gets mixed in there, mixed with like kind of the proggy thing and [Allan] Holdsworth kind of vibe, too. So yeah, that stuff is is a real mix of everything that I like. I mean, there’s some rock stuff in there. There’s some heavy riffs. There’s the clean kind of King Crimson guitar riffing.

I got to see — a few years ago, like 2017, I got to see the three-drummer lineup of King Crimson...

Yeah, I saw that too.

I saw them down in Red Bank in 2017.

Oh, yeah, I was there.

You were at that show? Okay. I was surprised at how much that stuff swung.

Oh, I know. Big time. And how all those drummers played together. It was beautiful. So amazing.

Yeah, because I had seen the two-drummer lineup of the Melvins, and that was pretty insane. But to see all three of them. It was nuts.

That was awesome. Did you see the Beat tour?

No, I can’t hang with ’80s Crimson, honestly.

Oh, really? That's interesting, what is it, the vocals or is it the poppy songs?

Yeah, it’s mostly Adrian Belew. I admit it.

Okay, interesting. All right.

The Ray Suhy/Lewis Porter Quartet’s What Happens Next comes out on Friday.